From the ArcaMax Publishing, Politics Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/politics/s-372529-710138
Last Friday afternoon, the guests taking part in Sunday's roundtable
discussion on "This Week" had a pre-show call with George
Stephanopoulos. One of the topics he raised was Obama's perceived move
to the center, and what it means. Thus began my weekend obsession. If
you were within shouting distance of me, odds are we talked about it.
I talked about it over lunch with HuffPost's D.C. team, over dinner
with friends, with the doorman at the hotel, and with the driver on
the way to the airport.
As part of this process, I looked at the Obama campaign not through
the prism of my own progressive views and beliefs but through the
prism of a cold-eyed campaign strategist who has no principles except
winning. From that point of view, and taking nothing else into
consideration, I can unequivocally say: The Obama campaign is making a
very serious mistake. Tacking to the center is a losing strategy. And
don't let the latest head-to-head poll numbers lull you the way they
lulled Hillary Clinton in December.
Running to the middle in an attempt to attract undecided swing voters
didn't work for Al Gore in 2000. It didn't work for John Kerry in
2004. And it didn't work when Mark Penn (obsessed with his
"microtrends" and missing the megatrend) convinced Hillary Clinton to
do it in 2008.
Fixating on -- and pandering to -- this fickle crowd is all about
messaging tailored to avoid offending rather than to inspire and
galvanize. And isn't galvanizing the electorate to demand fundamental
change the raison d'etre of the Obama campaign in the first place?
This is how David Axelrod put it at the end of February, contrasting
the tired Washington model of "I'll do these things for you" with
Obama's "Let's do these things together":
"This has been the premise of Barack's politics all his life, going
back to his days as a community organizer," Axelrod told me. "He has
really lived and breathed it, which is why it comes across so
authentically. Of course, the time also has to be right for the man
and the moment to come together. And, after all the country has been
through over the last seven years, the times are definitely right for
the message that the only way to get real change is to activate the
American people to demand it."
Watering down that brand is the political equivalent of New Coke. Call
it Obama Zero.
In 2004, the Kerry campaign's obsession with undecided voters --
voters so easily swayed that 46 percent of them found credible the
Swift Boaters' charges that Kerry might have faked his war wounds to
earn a Purple Heart -- allowed the race to devolve from a referendum
on the future of the country into a petty squabble over whether Kerry
had bled enough to warrant his medals.
Throughout the primary, Obama referred to himself as an "unlikely
candidate." Which he certainly was -- and still is. And one of the
things that turned him from "unlikely" upstart to presidential
frontrunner is his ability to expand the electorate by convincing
unlikely voters -- some of the 83 million eligible voters who didn't
turn out in 2004 -- to engage in the system.
So why start playing to the political fence sitters -- staking out
newly nuanced positions on FISA, gun control laws, expansion of the
death penalty, and NAFTA?
In an interview with Nina Easton in Fortune Magazine, Obama was asked
about having called NAFTA "a big mistake" and "devastating." Obama's
reply: "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and
amplified."
Overheated? So when he was campaigning in the Midwest, many parts of
which have been, yes, devastated by economic changes since the passage
of NAFTA, and he pledged to make use of a six-month opt-out clause in
the trade agreement, that was "overheated"? Or was that one
"amplified"?
Because if that's the case, it would be helpful going forward if Obama
would let us know which of his powerful rhetoric is "overheated"
and/or "amplified," so voters will know not to get their hopes too
high.
When Obama kneecaps his own rhetoric and dilutes his positioning as a
different kind of politician, he is also giving his opponent a huge
opening to reassert the McCain-as-Maverick brand. We know that McCain
has completely abandoned any legitimate claim on his maverick image,
but the echoes of that reputation are still very much with us --
especially among many in the media who would love nothing more than to
be able to once again portray McCain as the real leader they fell in
love with in 2000. And the new Straight Talk Express plane has been
modeled on its namesake bus, decked out to better recreate the
seduction.
The transition between the primaries and the general election -- and
from insurgent to frontrunner -- is tricky. Even a confident campaign
can be knocked off course. So this is when Obama most needs to
remember what got him to this point -- and stick with it.
In a Los Angeles Times article detailing Obama's attempts at "shifting
toward the center," Matt Bennett of the centrist think tank Third Way
says that Obama is a "good politician. He's doing all he can to make
sure people know he would govern as a post-partisan moderate."
But isn't being a "good politician" as it's meant here exactly what
Obama defined himself as being against? Instead of Third Way think
tankers, Obama should listen to this guy:
"What's stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our
politics -- the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and
trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for
scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and
building a working consensus to tackle big problems. . . . The time
for that politics is over. It's time to turn the page."
That was Barack Obama in February of 2007, announcing his run for the
White House. "I know I haven't spent a lot of time learning the ways
of Washington," he said that day, "but I've been there long enough to
know that the ways of Washington must change."
Was that just "overheated and amplified" rhetoric?
The Obama brand has always been about inspiration, a new kind of
politics, the audacity of hope, and "change we can believe in." I like
that brand. More importantly, voters -- especially unlikely voters --
like that brand.
Pulling it off the shelf and replacing it with a political product
geared to pleasing America's vacillating swing voters -- the ones who
will be most susceptible to the fear-mongering avalanche that has
already begun -- would be a fatal blunder.
Realpolitik is one thing. Realstupidpolitik is quite another.
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Arianna Huffington's e-mail address is arianna@huffingtonpost.com.